move – Empa's Future Mobility Demonstrator

Sustainable mobility means massively reducing the use of fossil energy sources as well as CO2 emissions. One option is to convert surplus, renewable electricity into storable energy carriers that are suitably low in CO2, such as hydrogen or synthetic methane, and can be used as fuels for individual mobility and transport of goods. In move, the demonstrator for future mobility, Empa has teamed up with partners from research, industry and the public sector to show how the mobility of tomorrow might work without fossil energy.

According to the “New Energy Policy” (NEP) of the Swiss Federal Office of Energy (SFOE), by 2050 almost 50 percent of the mileage in the car sector is to be covered by electric vehicles and at least 50 percent by vehicles with combustion engines.

This should slash the vehicles’ energy consumption as the majority of it stems from renewable energy. For electro-mobility, the priority is the electrochemical storage of surplus electricity in network or vehicle batteries and its electrolytic conversion into hydrogen for use by fuel cell vehicles. For combustion engine vehicles, surplus electricity should be rendered usable by converting it into synthetic fuels such as methane. This is where our research at Empa comes in.

move, the demonstrator for future mobility, provides examples to show the entire pathway of using and converting surplus renewable electricity for mobility – in the form of hydrogen and, in later stages, in the form of synthetic methane and network batteries. In the case of hydrogen, its pure use as a fuel for fuel cell vehicles and its use as an admixture to natural/biogas for gas vehicles is investigated.

The vehicles that are used in practice within the scope of various projects are equipped with state-of-the-art powertrain concepts and technologies. Besides the optimization of energy conversion and storage technologies, move should also demonstrate which technology is best suited for which “mobility type”.

Electric vehicles for short and city trips, hydrogen-driven fuel cells for buses and communal vehicles, and gas engines for medium-sized cars and delivery vans.